No Jobs for Law School Graduates

Back in January College Guide wrote that there simply aren’t enough legal jobs for all the lawyers the country produces. Today, according to a Wall Street Journalarticle by Jonnelle Marte, only 71 percent of the law class of 2009 have real legal jobs. This is down from 75 percent, which is also pretty low, for the class of 2008.

Or, as Indiana University’s law professor Bill Henderson put it a year ago in a piece he wrote for NALP Bulletin last year: “It is painfully obvious to everyone that it does not matter where you went to school, or who you clerked for—a lawyer in his or her first… year of practice is just not worth $275 per hour.”

Most recent law school grads are now doing stand up comedy or “consulting” or dumpster diving or strongarm robbery, because the economy tanked and suddenly everyone figured out, hey, we don’t really need to be paying insane salaries to thousands upon thousands of unmotivated twentysomethings languishing here at our law firm just because they couldn’t figure out anything better to tell their dad they were doing after they graduated from Sarah Lawrence.